{"id":5056,"date":"2013-01-27T14:05:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T14:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2013-01-27T14:05:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-27T14:05:53","slug":"hard-choices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/hard-choices\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard choices"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adam Gopnik in the latest New Yorker<\/em> magazine, writing of his former teacher, McGill University psychologist Albert Bregman:<\/p>\n

he also gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received.\u00a0 Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought.\u00a0\u00a0 He squinted and lowered his head.\u00a0 “Is this a hard<\/em> choice for you?” he demanded.\u00a0 Yes! I cried. “Oh,” he said, springing back up cheerfully.\u00a0\u00a0 “In that case, it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way.\u00a0 Hard choices are always unimportant. ” (page 35, italics in original)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t agree that hard choices are always unimportant, since different options may have very different consequences, and with very different footprints (who is impacted, in what ways, and to what extents).\u00a0 Perhaps what Bregman meant to say is that whatever option is selected in such cases will prove feasible to some extent or other, and we will usually survive the consequences that result.\u00a0 Why would this be?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think it because, as Bregman says, each decision-option in such cases has multiple pros and cons, and so no one option uniformly dominates the others.\u00a0 No option is obviously or uniformly better:\u00a0 there is\u00a0no “slam-dunk” or “no-brainer” decision-option.\u00a0\u00a0
\nIn such cases,\u00a0whatever we choose will potentially have\u00a0negative\u00a0consequences which\u00a0we may have to live with.\u00a0 Usually, however, we don’t seek to live with these consequences.\u00a0 Instead, we try to eliminate them, or ameliorate them, or mitigate them, or divert them, or undermine them, or even ignore them.\u00a0 Only when all else fails, do we live in full awareness\u00a0with the negative consequences of our decisions.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, attempting to pre-emptively anticipate and eliminate or divert or undermine or ameliorate or mitigate negative consequences is a key part of human decision-making for complex decisions, something I’ve called (following Harald Wohlrapp),\u00a0retroflexive decision-making<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 We try to diminish the negative effects of an option and enhance the positive\u00a0effects as part of the process of making our decision.
\nAs a second-year\u00a0undergraduate at university, I was, like Gopnik, faced with a choice of majors; for me it was either Pure Mathematics or English.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Now, with more experience of life, I would simply refuse to make this choice, and seek to do both together.\u00a0 Then, as a sophomore, I was intimidated by the arguments presented to me by the university administration seeking, for reasons surely only of bureaucratic\u00a0order<\/a>, to force me to choose:\u00a0 this combination is not\u00a0permitted (to which I would respond now with:\u00a0 And why not?<\/em>); there are many timetable clashes (I can work around those<\/em>);\u00a0\u00a0no one else has ever asked to do both (Why is that relevant to my decision?<\/em>); and, the skills required are too different (Well, I’ve been accepted onto Honours track in both subjects, so I must have the required skills<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\nAs an aside:\u00a0 In making this decision, I asked the advice of poet Alec Hope, whom I knew a little.\u00a0\u00a0 He too as an undergraduate had studied both Mathematics and English, and had opted eventually for English.\u00a0 He told me he chose English because he could understand on his own the poetry and fiction he read, but understanding Mathematics, he said, for him, required the help of others.\u00a0 Although I thought I could learn and understand mathematical subjects well enough from books on my own, it was, for me,\u00a0precisely the social nature of Mathematics that attracted me: One wasn’t merely\u00a0creating some subjective personal interpretations or imaginings as one read, but participating in the joint creation of an objective\u00a0shared mathematical space, albeit a space located in the collective heads of mathematicians.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What could be more exciting than that!?
\nMore posts on complex decisions here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.\u00a0
\nReference:<\/em>
\nAdam Gopnik [2013]: Music to your ears: The quest for 3D\u00a0recording and other mysteries of sound<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>, 28 January 2013, pp. 32-39.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Gopnik in the latest New Yorker magazine, writing of his former teacher, McGill University psychologist Albert Bregman: he also gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received.\u00a0 Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought.\u00a0\u00a0 He squinted and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,44,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decision-theory","category-literature","category-mathematics","p1","y2013","m01","d27","h14"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}